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The third in Naxos’
first-rate series of CDs featuring Orchestre National de Lyon under Leonard
Slatkin performing Ravel’s orchestral music moves into territory where Ravel is
both well-known and little-known. A first-rate orchestrator in a long French
tradition dating back to Berlioz, Ravel brought subtlety and a sure sense of
color to various works he orchestrated at the request of ballet impresarios and
publishers. His handling of the Chabrier, Debussy and Schumann pieces heard
here is exemplary and entirely typical of Ravel’s method of extracting warmth
and color from others’ music while giving it a stamp indicative of his own
careful attention to orchestral nuance. Only four movements of Ravel’s
orchestration of Carnaval survive,
enough to whet the appetite for more: Préambule,
Valse allemande, Intermezzo: Paganini, and the final Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins.
None of these Ravel orchestrations is heard particularly often – but his
most-famous orchestral arrangement certainly is. It is his brilliantly realized
version of Mussorgsky’s piano suite, Pictures
at an Exhibition, a piece so frequently performed that it sometimes comes
as a shock to remember that it is not by
Ravel. The elegant touches Ravel brings to Mussorgsky continue to delight
listeners: the alto saxophone in The Old
Castle, the tuba in Bydlo, the
varied handlings of the reappearances of the Promenade, and many more. Slatkin has himself orchestrated one Promenade that was originally omitted by
Ravel, who was working from a version of Pictures
at an Exhibition prepared by Rimsky-Korsakov – the only one available when
Ravel took on his commission in 1922. There are arguments that can be made
against aspects of what Ravel did with Mussorgsky: the whole suite has more of
a smooth French sound than a traditional, less-elegant Russian one, and
individual elements can certainly be nitpicked by those so inclined. But the
fact is that this two-composer orchestral Pictures
sounds wonderful in and of itself, and although many others have had a go at Pictures (Slatkin himself has previously
recorded a pastiche version, with movements by multiple orchestrators), it is
Ravel’s that stands as testimony both to the fascination of Mussorgsky’s
original work and to the brilliant display it can present in orchestral guise.

One orchestrator who was
dissatisfied with Ravel’s Pictures
because he deemed it insufficiently Russian in tone was Leopold Stokowski, who
made his own transcription (omitting two of the movements) in 1939. Stokowski
was an inveterate changer and rearranger of others’ music, generally in a bid
to popularize works that he felt worthy but underplayed – but sometimes for
reasons that seem, in retrospect, capricious. It is certainly true that Gustav Mahler,
an expert conductor and arranger prior to Stokowski, had expanded and even
bloated some music and had not even hesitated to make changes to Beethoven. But
Mahler was also a pre-eminent composer, and if his changes seem like
depredations many years later, that means only that they were mired in the
aesthetics of Mahler’s own time. Stokowski, however, sometimes seemed to overdo
things simply because he so much enjoyed doing so. His onetime associate conductor,
José Serebrier, has made a
series of recordings of Stokowski’s transcriptions in recent years, and his
latest Naxos release – a compilation from the earlier ones – shows both the
pluses and the minuses of the Stokowski approach. Pictures at an Exhibition is not included here, but A Night on Bare Mountain (also from
1939) is, and it comes across quite well, with a kind of gnarled intensity that
is closer to Mussorgsky’s own orchestration (which was then unknown) than is
the more-often-heard, much-smoothed-over orchestral version by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Other meldings of Stokowski’s thoughts with those of other composers are less
happy ones: his re-emphasis of Wagner is over-the-top, and while Stokowski’s
orchestral versions of Bach may bring back fond memories of the conductor’s
participation in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia,
they are quite overdone and unsubtle from a strictly musical standpoint. The
Tchaikovsky, Boccherini and Purcell works are pleasant miniatures (with some
fine cello playing by Timothy Walden in the Purcell), and Stokowski’s short
arrangement of traditional Slavic Christmas music has a pleasant encore-like
feeling about it despite its placement midway on this disc. The CD is enjoyable
for Stokowski fans – he was, after all, so well-known in his time that both
Disney and longtime rival Warner Brothers included him in cartoons, with Bugs
Bunny doing a hilarious “Leopold” impression in Long-Haired Hare (1949). And some of Stokowski’s orchestral touches
are elegant and perspicacious. But they are also relics of an earlier time,
when the music heard here was not thought (at least by Stokowski himself) to be
able to stand on its own in its original guise.

While professed Russophiles
argue back and forth about the various merits of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Ravel and Stokowski, music lovers in general can get a hefty and very welcome
dose of Russian music for piano and orchestra on a newly and nicely remastered
MSR Classics two-CD set of six concertos played, with considerable élan and
technique to spare, by Joshua Pierce. The concertos range from the extremely
well-known to the not-very-understandably neglected. The two by Tchaikovsky
heard here are at the poles: everyone knows No. 1 and it sometimes seems that
everyone plays it, while the one-movement No. 3 is rarely heard. Pierce probes
the lyricism as well as the dynamism of both works, and conductor Paul Freeman
makes a first-rate partner, helping sustain interest in No. 1 after the grand
(and grandiose) first movement gives way to the gentleness of the Andantino semplice, then pulling out all
the stops for a fiery finale. The single-movement No. 3 shares some elements of
the first movement of No. 1 in its frequent tempo and mood changes, and Pierce
and Freeman handle them in a similar and highly convincing way. The short
(13-minute) and infrequently heard (at least outside Russia) concerto by, yes,
Rimsky-Korsakov, is a fascinating foil for the two Tchaikovsky concertos. It is
a lyrical, good-humored work with careful orchestration and elegantly concise
expression – and Kirk Trevor, who conducts only this concerto among the six in
this release, ably abets Pierce’s bright and forthright approach. The set’s
second CD focuses on the 20th century rather than the 19th,
and is every bit as winning. The orchestration of Khachaturian’s concerto is
particularly attractive (although Freeman does not use the musical saw for
which the composer called in the Andante).
This is a vivid reading that, to its credit, pays particularly close attention
to Khachaturian’s exotic themes and strong rhythms. Shostakovich’s Second
Concerto is upbeat, too, unlike most of the composer’s non-theatrical music,
and it is also rather superficial, albeit in a pleasing and involving way. The
enthusiastic outer movements, whose difficult passages appear to give Pierce no
trouble at all, contrast nicely with the only slightly melancholic Andante. Prokofiev’s First is sterner,
darker stuff, a strong contrast with the Shostakovich, with very speedy outer
movements and a central Andante assai
whose beauty has a rather sinister tinge to it. This thoroughly engaging
recording makes both a fine tribute to Pierce’s pianism and a memorable
memorial to Freeman (1936-2015), who shows himself in these concertos to be a
full and able partner for Pierce – two Americans whose sensitivity to and
understanding of this Russian repertoire is as convincing as it is involving.

The MSR Classics project
undertaken by a fine chamber ensemble with a deliberately obscure name, enhakē – small first letter, whole word
from the Seminole for “sound,” and, really, why? – is to present works by
Argentine concert-tango master Ástor
Piazzolla in the unusual instrumental combination of clarinet, violin, cello
and piano. Violinist M. Brent Williams is responsible for arranging Piazzolla
for this recording, and he does so with considerable skill. All nine works here
come across with a pleasant mixture of exotic sound, concert-hall solemnity and
a kind of “street smarts.” There are some very well-known pieces on the CD,
including Primavera Porteña
and Libertango, and they have a
freshness here, thanks to the unexpected instrumentation, that shows them in a
new light and further affirms the appropriateness of their place in “high”
music despite the decidedly “low” origin of the tango itself. The Concerto para Quinteto comes across
particularly well in this performance – these are musicians who are clearly
comfortable with each other as well as with their individual instruments, and
there is a relaxed, jazz-ensemble feeling to their performances despite the
fact that these are not pieces played extemporaneously. All the works here are
worth hearing – the others are Revirado,
Escualo, Oblivion, Prepárense, Kicho and Buenos Aires Hora Cero. Williams’
arrangements sometimes try a bit too hard to make sure that each performer gets
front-and-center attention and that, when the group plays together, everyone is
balanced equally against everyone else. This is excellent camaraderie but can
result in arrangements that are a bit too cautious not to overdo the sound of
any specific instrument. This is a quibble, though, and some listeners will
actually like the disc more because of the neat ensemble balance and the
careful way the arrangements make just about equal room for everyone. The CD is
short – 47 minutes – but long enough to give listeners a strong sense of the
quality of Piazzolla’s music and the effectiveness of hearing it on instruments
other than those for which it was originally composed.

There is also an unusual and
well-matched chamber ensemble on the new CD called Hand Eye. The group is a sextet, Eighth Blackbird, that takes its
name from the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The chamber players here are Tim Munro,
flute; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinet; Yvonne Lam, violin; Nicholas Photinos,
cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion; and Lisa Kaplan, piano. As for the disc
itself, its title is the title of the single piece on it – which is actually a
compilation of works by Timo Andres (Checkered
Shade), Andrew Norman (Mine, Mime,
Meme), Robert Honstein (Conduit,
with movements labeled Touch, Pulse
and Send), Chris Cerrone (South Catalina), Ted Hearne (By-By Huey), and Jacob Cooper (Cast). This is one of those projects
that proclaims itself totally contemporary, with-it, avant-garde, up-to-date,
and so forth, and it actually contains enough interesting musical material to
get a (+++) rating – although the individual elements of this world première recording are scarcely riveting. Hand Eye takes us right back to Pictures at an Exhibition, with which a
comparison is probably inevitable, since this brand-new work, like
Mussorgsky’s, is intended as a musical representation of modern art (in the
case of Hand Eye, works from the
private collection of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art in
Michigan). Contemporary art is in the main non-representational, and certainly
has none of the photographic qualities of art in the days before photographs
became ubiquitous. It is therefore a bit quixotic to create a work representing
that which is inherently non-representational; but that sort of self-reference,
or self-non-reference, is integral to a great deal of modern thinking in and
about art and music. Since listeners cannot be expected to know the specific
works “represented” (or reacted to) in Hand
Eye, and since the composers cannot paint miniature aural pictures of
representational paintings in the way that Mussorgsky could of Victor
Hartmann’s work, this CD must rise or fall as a purely musical experience. It lasts
nearly an hour and a quarter, twice the length of Mussorgsky’s Pictures, and often feels over-extended despite
the different approaches of the composers. The reality is that the six-person
ensemble does not have the sonic variety that Ravel brought to Mussorgsky’s
piano suite, and the original suite itself possesses coloristic elements that
are, by intent, largely absent in contemporary compositions. Hand Eye is an interesting experiment in
melding modern visual and aural art, with some involving elements and others
that simply sound as if they are trying too hard to be cutting-edge. Eighth
Blackbird plays the music commendably, but the project itself proves less than
compelling.